Greetings!
I have been making great progress over the past few weeks on conflict.
The first step was to add a banish command. This is long requested, and was necessary for conflict, to be able to tidy up any elderly stragglers if you take over an AI tribe for example. So this now works, you can banish your own sapiens, and you can attempt to banish sapiens from other tribes too. You can now also recruit from ai tribes, and other tribes in multiplayer too.
And it's not just a simple "always succeeds" situation anymore. When you recruit or banish (except when banishing your own sapiens, which always succeeds), there is a displayed difficulty dependent on their relationship to you, their tribe type and their loyalty to their tribes. This can be offset by the traits and diplomacy skill level of your sapien. If recruitment/banishment fails, you can usually just try again, but it can have some impact on your reputation with the other tribe. It's all working really nicely, and opens up a lot of doors for interesting gameplay.
Next, it was time to fix food raids, which have been broken for a long time now. They did work back when the game first launched on early access, but we needed a way to fight back, without that they were actually just kind of annoying. So when they stopped working I didn't fix them, the "food raiders" would just run in and run out again without taking anything or causing any trouble.
But that is no longer the case, they now come and steal your food, and you can attempt to banish them. Banishing is unlikely to succeed though, and you can also now attack them too.
The first form of combat I have been working on is simple hand-to-hand fist fights. I haven't added the animations yet, so they just kick dirt at each other, but everything under the hood is coming together, and I'm starting to see some pretty entertaining encounters. I've been fighting off endless attacks (for testing purposes) from food raiders. Notifications are working, elders/pregnant sapiens/children are handled correctly, and those who are assigned to the hand to hand combat role attack. When sapiens are attacked, they go through a fight or flight response kind of check, where they might fight back too. So you risk injuring your sapiens when you attack, they might attack back.
There are still a bunch of loose ends to tidy up, spear combat is only half way there so far, I need new animations and sound effects, new types of raids, and there are lots of little things to balance and improve, but it's already pretty fun.
The first conflict update will only be a start, it'll be coming to the unstable branch in the next few weeks, and remember that there will be a peaceful setting, all conflict will be optional!
-Dave